


Those Aren't Stars

by gurekure (kurenix)



Series: YGO Ship Olympics - Team Dartship [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Anime Spoilers, Gen, M/M, Mental Breakdown, War, ygoshipolympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:52:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4526304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurenix/pseuds/gurekure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sawatari Shingo is the son of the next Major General of the Obelisk Force, and his roommate Yuuya's getting everything he wanted. [Fusion Dimension AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One of Team Dartship's three submissions for Round 4 of the YGO Ship Olympics (http://ygoshipolympics.dreamwidth.org/). If you liked it, please vote on the main site! We'd really appreciate your support!
> 
> Meets the 'victory' prompt and 'bitter' challenge; both words can be found in several prominent places.
> 
> Once again, endless thanks to the members of Dartship Academy for making this possible! Stars can't shine without dar(t)ness ❤

The stars turned green the night of the First Invasion. That’s what most of the southern islands believe, anyway – those with their eyes on the skies saw them flash with Fusion’s first victory, while others fixed their gaze to the ground and cried propaganda. But for Sawatari Shingo, the son of the next Major General of the Obelisk Force, the stars are the fire in his veins. If he’s ever alone and scared of war, cards forbid, he watches for lights behind the clouds and considers them sacrament. To win is fate; to rule is destiny.

He watches for them now, on the boat to Academia. The whole first–year cohort is here, a throng of thirteen-year-olds shoving their way to the front railings and squinting at the horizon for their first glimpse of the island. Even though everyone knows exactly what it looks like – a mountain castle with towers that touch the clouds; sprawling ports and tunnels in the rock faces below; chrome spires floating in the air like miracles. They’ve pasted pictures of it on their bedroom windows to sleep in its shadow, waiting and waiting for the day the boat would come to their shores, take them across the sea, and turn them into soldiers.

That’s why it doesn’t matter that Sawatari Shingo – son of the next Major General, undefeated duelist in the entire two-block radius from his house, clear shoo-in for early advance to the frontlines – isn’t there to see it. It doesn’t matter that he’s stranded at the back, his three best friends scattered in the crowd, battling the rising bile in his throat all by himself. He just needs to find those flashes of green and remember that he deserves to be here.

“Hey! You’re looking for them too?”

Suddenly, there’s another boy next to him. He’s got wide red eyes, hair like a literal tomato and a pair of oversized goggles strapped to his forehead, and he looks like the happiest kid in the world.

"Looking for what?"

"The green stars!" he says, grabbing the railing with both hands and leaning out above the water. “My mom and I look for them every night. They say it’s energy or something! Academia catches all the light up there to power their teleporters and stuff.”

He talks to Shingo like they’ve known each other for years. They’re the losers at the back of the crowd – not that Shingo’s a loser, of course! he’ll find his friends and meet his Papa on the island and then life will really begin – but the thought doesn’t seem to cross his mind at all. He radiates pure joy, and he tilts his head to the sky like he’s tasting raindrops.

“So, what’s your name?”

“You don’t know who I am?” Shingo replies, affronted. “I’m Sawatari Shingo, son of the next Major General of the Obelisk Force!”

His proclamation is met with nothing but a few bewildered blinks. “He’s not Major General _yet_... but Papa says he’ll be promoted soon, just watch!”

“Ok! I’ll be waiting for it,” the other boy laughs. “Anyway, I’m Sakaki Yuuya. You’ve heard of my dad, right?”

Of course he has. Everyone knows Sakaki Yushou, the man who stood on the very first frontlines of Heartland and made an art of annihilation. The man who turned the battlefield into a stage, making such fools of the duelists he faced it was like putting on a show. The man who demolished his opponents with such finality and flourish that they didn’t even have room to be bitter.

The man who fled on the first day of war.

“I’m gonna be just like him!”

They call him a deserter now, a coward. For a soldier as capable as he was, what could explain his disappearance other than terror or treason? Shingo should be furious at this boy for the sins of his father, on behalf of the dimension he betrayed. He should turn around, right now, and never speak to this spawn of a traitor again.

But Sakaki Yuuya doesn’t look like a traitor. He’s got a smile that knows no shame, and Shingo can’t help but smile back.

“We’ll see about that!”

They spend the rest of the boat ride looking for stars together.

 

*

There are three wings in Academia’s mountain castle. Slifer Red is for the future paper-pushers who, as much as they want to be part of the dimensional war effort, don’t have a drip of combat potential. Ra Yellow is where most trainees end up, with equal chance of moving up or down the ranks by the time graduation rolls around. But Shingo’s assigned to Obelisk Blue right away, just as he should be. He’s the son of the next Major General, after all! You have to graduate from Obelisk Blue to become a high-ranking official, and that’s what Shingo’s going to do – climb to the top of the Force and fight alongside his Papa.

Whether it’s despite or because of his family name, Yuuya also enters Obelisk Blue. In fact, they're assigned to the same room. They sit on their matching beds making their walls their own: Yuuya sticks up pictures of his family and friends – a blonde-haired lady who looks like his mother, a pink-haired girl who could be a sister, a thick-eyebrowed guy who doesn't look related at all – while Shingo lines up some of the parallel rares he doesn't have room for in his deck. He’s got a neat row of twelve, shimmering faintly in the scarce sunlight that gets through the windows.

"Wow, that's a lot of rares, Sawatari."

Shingo grins, leaning back on his hands to admire his work. “There’s lots more where those came from! Only the best for the best duelist, and parallel rares are obviously the best cards of all.”

"I don't know about that..." Yuuya muses, taking out his deck and riffling through it. Shingo can't see much from the other side of the room, but Yuuya's cards are so garish and colourful he'd notice them miles away. His monsters are completely unfamiliar to Shingo, mostly because they're the kind he would toss aside without a second glance: a cartoon rattlesnake, a really muscular gorilla, and is that... is that a hippo –?! "Rare, not rare... I think every card's got something special."

Maybe Shingo doesn't like this boy as much as he thought.

But before he can really give Yuuya a lesson in the proper appreciation of parallel rares, it's time for the welcome assembly. They shrug off their salt-stained clothes and don the deep blue uniforms proclaiming them the elite trainees of Academia, the heavy fabric setting their shoulders high and straight as they walk into the main hall. Yuuya finds his Ra Yellow friends right away – Yuzu and Gongenzaka, as he introduces them, before they strike up a conversation and disappear into the crowd. Of course, it's not like Shingo doesn't have friends too! He's got _more_ friends than Yuuya, even – but just as he's about to regale Ootomo, Yamabe, and Kakimoto with his first Obelisk Blue stories, the Professor arrives.

They've all been waiting their entire lives to meet this man. His is the face they see in every textbook, in every newspaper, on TV screens every half-hour – but those are cheap counterfeits compared to what’s in front of them now. Even his two sons and successors, legends in their own right, seem invisible at his sides. With his broad, dark shoulders and his purple robes flowing behind him as he crosses the hall, it's like he could eclipse the sun. When he reaches his throne and turns his gaze upon his students, it's like his eyes could put out fires. And when he starts to speak, it’s cold and cutting, damning XYZ to ruin and razing the whole dimension to the ground with his voice alone. Yet his icy words ignite the whole room into a battle cry. Shingo's heart burns like a supernova – he's here, he's finally here, and he's going to make the whole world proud.

(And there's his father, standing along the far wall in full regalia with the rest of the Professor's escort. Shingo rushes to the front like a bullet when the cohort is dismissed, going as fast as he can with all the other students in his way, but Papa's gone before he can reach him.)

 

*

Total victory. That's what you're taught at Academia: you can't just _beat_ an opponent, but you have to crush them till there's nothing left. So they change the blades of your duel disks into swords that remind you to kill, and they teach you all the ways to do it quickly with one-turn kills and even first-turn kills, draining the other duelist of all their life points before they can make a single move. They even give you a new deck for maximum brute force – large, armoured Antique Gears that form a iron wall at your backs when you all march into battle like the unstoppable force you are.

Shingo thinks the Gears are ugly. Why would he, the son of the next Major General, want to use the same deck as everyone else? At least the uniform and duel disk look nice enough, but _total victory_ isn’t as flashy as it sounds. After a few months of duels that end too fast and repeat the same thing over and over and over, he starts dragging his feet to class. It’s not that he’s slacking off – he’s a top student, he’s sure! – but it just gets so _boring_.

Sakaki Yuuya isn’t boring, though. He calls his and his father’s style _entertainment dueling_ , and that’s exactly what it is: somehow he’s taken his standard-issue deck and created a show all his own. He handles his Gears in a wildly different way each time, dancing around his opponent before beating them into the ground, all the while sporting a smile that never dies. Even card sealing becomes interesting when he does it, and that’s just pressing a few buttons on your disk to trap your downed prey in empty cards – Yuuya seals his enemies like he’s sending off the dead, folding at the waist in a deep bow and turning each purple flash into a funeral pyre. Needless to say, when it’s his turn in the practice arena, everyone comes down to watch.

It’s impossible _not_ to love him. Soon he’s being followed everywhere he goes, by classmates pestering him for dueling advice (a true entertainer never reveals his secrets! he replies with a wink), and instructors scouting him out for early promotion. A week before the first semester ends, Shingo’s walking out of assembly when he sees Yuuya by the lockers staring nervously up at Akaba Reiji, the Professor’s eldest son. At first he looks like he’s in trouble, but when Reiji leaves, a huge grin unfolds on Yuuya’s face and stays there for the rest of the day.

Definitely early promotion, then. Before him! Shingo storms back to the dormitories with every mind to go straight to Papa and demand he repair this injustice – if he can even find Papa, that is – but when he gets to his room, Yuuya is there. So is the Professor’s youngest – he’s sitting on Shingo’s bed but he leaps off once he notices the door open, eyes wide and terrified. His eyes are the creepiest things Shingo has ever seen.

“What’s going on here, Sakaki Yuuya?”

“Oh, Sawatari!” Yuuya says from inside his closet, like he’d forgotten Shingo existed until that moment. “Sorry about that… the Professor wants to see me in his chambers, and Akaba Reiji wanted me to pick up Reira from his class along the way.”

He’s obviously beside himself with joy – his voice is full of it.

“Hmph! And he didn’t even ask me to come with you!”

But Shingo can’t feel anything but bitter.

“Sawatari…”

“It’s fine, whatever! I’ve got other things to do anyway. I’m having a special, _exclusive_ dinner with Papa later, we’ve been planning it for weeks! And after that, I’m dueling Ootomo, Yamabe, and Kakimoto with our _real_ decks!”

“That’s great!” replies Yuuya as he heads out the door, taking Reira’s hand as he leaves. “The Professor asked me to bring my Entermate deck too. I guess we’re both having fun tonight!”

Shingo skips dinner.

 

*

From then on, there’s no doubt that Sakaki Yuuya is the star of the school. Everyone knows that he visits the Professor almost every day, and the rumours that he’s being sent to Heartland soon run so rampant that it’s basically considered truth. No one’s risen so high at such a young age – no one since Akaba Reiji himself. The name _Yushou_ doesn’t come up once.

Now that Yuuya’s rarely in class, the other trainees swarm Shingo instead. They’re all hungry for information – some gunning for the same special treatment, most craving fantasies to keep them going after a hard day. _What’s it like in XYZ? Is everyone a duelist? Do they really eat each other when there’s no food? Sakaki must tell you everything!_

Yuuya doesn’t tell him anything. He only returns to their room late at night, when the moon’s high in the sky, and he always comes back bone-tired. His entire being droops with weariness: his limbs, his eyes, the corners of his mouth. Shingo pesters him just like their classmates the first time – what it’s like, how many people he’s dueled, whether he’s seen Papa on the battlefield – but Yuuya just gives him a small, longsuffering smile. “I think I need some shut-eye, Sawatari. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, alright?”

Shingo would be happy to harass his roommate till sunrise, but there’s something heavy in Yuuya’s voice that makes him stop short. Something heavy, hard, and dark. For all the nights after that, he lets him sleep without a word.

As the year goes by, it becomes clear that it’s more than just fatigue weighing him down. In the mornings, Yuuya’s fine – he goes for assembly with his smile that knows no shame, chatting to Gongenzaka like he’s got no cares in the world, greeting his adoring classmates with the perfect mix of humility and confidence. But that never-dying smile is dying now, vanishing with the sunlight at the end of every day. He used to search for green stars in the window at night; now he throws the sheets over his head like he can’t bear to look at the sky.

Despite himself, Shingo starts to worry. He shouldn’t be – Yuuya’s living the Academia dream, how dare he be unhappy?! – but it’s the little things you can only see when you share a room with someone. Like when Yuuya keeps him up for an hour asking if he’s seen Yuzu, who’s been inexplicably missing the whole semester without any of the instructors acknowledging it. Like when Shingo realises that Yuuya’s ripping out the pictures above his bed, one by one, torn-off corners dangling from leftover tape on the wall.

Like when Yuuya screams. One night, Shingo wakes up to Yuuya in the middle of a nightmare - thrashing under the covers like he’s having a seizure, screaming fit to wake the dead. It’s wordless screaming, panicked and breathless, until the half-formed syllables finally resolve into a single name: Yuzu. _Yuzu–!_

After about a minute, Shingo can’t stand it anymore. He marches over to Yuuya’s bed and grasps him by the shoulders, trying to keep him still.

“Oi, Yuuya. If you’re going to make so much noise, then just wake up already!”

Somehow, it works. He doesn’t wake up, but Yuuya calms under Shingo’s hands, slowly but surely, as the nightmare fades away.

It becomes routine: they go to bed, Yuuya cries out in his sleep, Shingo makes him quiet again. Soon it’s happening every night without fail. The only difference is the names – one name per dream, and Shingo remembers every single one:

 _Yuzu_ , a few more times.

_Tatsuya. Ayu. Futoshi._

And once, mysteriously, _Sawatari_.

When the sun rises, Yuuya washes the nightmare off his face and puts his smile back on like armour, like nothing’s changed at all. It’s during one of these early-morning moments that it occurs to Shingo: right now, out of everyone in Academia, he knows him best.

 

*

On a particularly bad night, Yuuya screams himself awake and finds Shingo right on top of him.

“S-Sawatari–!”

“This has gone too far, Sakaki Yuuya! I’ve tried to be patient with you, but I’m losing too much beauty sleep dealing with your midnight terrors!”

“Wait, what...?” Yuuya trails off, grasping at crumpled bedsheets as he puts everything together.  “Every night?”

“What do you think?! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten!”

This is the time Yuuya would have laughed it off, made a playful jab at how Shingo nags just like his mom, reassured him that everything’s fine. But that was before; now he just puts his hands to his temples and sighs, squeezing his eyes shut. “Sawatari… I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t fix anything,” Shingo snaps, sitting cross-legged on his roommate’s bed so he’s looking Yuuya right in the eye. “You haven’t told me _anything_ about what’s going on with you. You haven’t told anyone!”

“I can’t really talk about it…”

“Oh, of _course_! It’s all top-secret and classified, for big boys only!” Shingo can feel the bitterness rising up his throat. “Aren’t we on the same side? I’m part of Fusion too! I’m a Duel Soldier, just like you!”

Yuuya looks at his hands, solemn and serious. “You’re not a soldier till you’ve been in battle.”

“So it’s true? You’ve been to Heartland?”

“...Yeah.”

He doesn’t even sound happy about it.

“Not on the frontlines, though. The Professor sends me on… special missions.”

“What missions? And don’t tell me it’s too _secret_ to talk about,” Shingo says, pointing to his eyebags. “If I have to deal with this every night, I have a right to know.”

“...Alright, just don’t tell anyone,” Yuuya concedes. “I’m looking for someone. A Heartlander.”

“A Heartlander? What for? Is he dangerous?”

“No, she… I don’t know. The Professor never said. It’s just… she looks exactly like Yuzu.”

“...So?”

“I’m serious, she’s the spitting image of her! If it weren’t for the hair, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart,” he says, and every word is an effort to explain something he doesn’t understand. “It probably has something to do with whatever they want Yuzu for.”

“Yuzu’s with the Professor?”

“Yeah. I mean. Sort of. They keep her locked up all the time, and I haven’t seen her for ages, and I don’t know _why_!”

Yuuya’s voice cracks. After that, the secrets pour out like water from a broken dam.

“You’re not the only one who doesn’t know things, Sawatari. Like… I’ve seen the battlefields. They… they told us that everyone in Heartland was a duelist, but they’re not. We fight civilians too. People who can’t fight back.”

Shingo doesn’t get it. “Isn’t that the point? Total victory! We don’t leave anything left standing. We crush till there’s nothing left.”

“You haven’t seen their _faces_ , Sawatari! When they get carded, and they have no idea what’s going on…” Yuuya shudders. “You wouldn’t want to be there.”

“Are you kidding me?! Of course I do! I’ve wanted to be there my _whole life_! I’d give my right arm to be where you are right now,” Shingo exclaims, and even though it’s nothing new to Yuuya, it’s the first time he’s said it this raw and pathetic. But he’s been wrecked and sleepless over this boy for weeks now and he doesn’t care anymore, he really doesn’t. “If you want out, I’d gladly take your place.”

“No,” Yuuya shakes his head with a terrible expression. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Sakaki Yuuya!”

“Really, you wouldn’t… especially if your dad’s involved.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“The ranked officials… they’re doing human experiments. They’re too secret to recruit test subjects outside, so…”

“...they do it on their children?”

“Even the Professor’s in on it! Reiji… Reiji tries, but...” and at this, of all things, Yuuya’s close to tears, “what they do to Reira…”

“ _Stop it_!!” Shingo yells. He doesn’t even need to think. “Academia’s just trying to get stronger! What’s wrong with that? We all dedicate ourselves to the war effort, body and soul!”

“I know! I know. But it’s so _different_ than what I thought it would be. I don’t think I can...”

“It’s different for me too! I thought being a Duel Soldier would be great and glamorous, but it’s not. You use boring decks and you duel boring duels and you wear a mask so people can’t even see who you are! But it’s all for victory, so I’ve gotta suck it up. We all do. And if you can’t see that, you’re as bad of a coward as your father!”

“He’snota coward!”

“He ran away from war, didn’t he? Just like you’re doing right now!”

“At least my dad fought! Not like your father, I’ve seen him, all he does is paperwork in the Professor’s office –”

“You dare talk about Papa like that?! I can’t _believe_ I let you watch for stars with me on our first day here! I should never have talked to you, you son of a traitor!”

“My father’s not a traitor!” Yuuya roars. “He fought for Fusion, and he dueled the way he wanted to, and everyone loved him, and _those aren’t stars!!_ ”

He deflates, curling into his bedsheets, and descends into a long silence before speaking again.

“I saw a machine in the Professor’s chambers, sucking up all the green light from the sky. I don’t know what for... but there were things floating in the light,” he says. “They’re all the cards Fusion has ever sealed. Those stars… they’re just cards. The stars are just… people…”

Yuuya buries his head in his knees and cries. Shingo stares, dumbstruck, because there’s nothing else he can do now. This is the kind of cry – messy, loud, pitiful – that can’t be stopped by hell or highwater. The ace of Academia sobs into his blanket while the son of the next Major General does absolutely nothing.

 

*

The next night, Shingo pretends to sleep until Yuuya goes to bed. He doesn’t want to talk to him again, let alone see his face, and he’s sure his roommate feels the same. What’s there to say? They’ve already said all they could to no avail, both of them entirely unable to comprehend the other. Yuuya will have another nightmare tonight and Shingo will rock him gently by the shoulders to make him sleep, whether he’s an apostate coward or just a scared little boy like the rest of them.

But when the night wears on and there’s no sound from the other side of the room, Shingo clambers out of bed anyway – half out of curiosity, half out of habit. There’s his tomato hair sticking out from under the bedsheets, his uniform jacket flung sloppily across the headboard like always, and the blank wall Yuuya tore clean of pictures long ago. But there’s something new on the bedside table, next to his duel disk. Five cards, face-down.

Shingo turns over the first card and recognises it immediately – with no title and a blank bottom half, it’s definitely a sealing card. But when he sees the face of the person inside, all the air goes out of his lungs: it’s a thick-eyebrowed guy who, if not for the hair, would look exactly like Gongenzaka.

He turns over the next card and this time it’s Yuuya’s mother, her hair dyed deep purple and her features frozen in agony.

The third card has three kids at once, mouths open wide in terror, faces plucked straight from the family pictures Yuuya can’t bear to look at anymore.

Reira’s in the card after that; the eyes of this boy are green, but that fearful, thousand-yard stare is one of a kind.

And the last card, right in the centre, is Shingo’s own face staring right back at him. Whoever this boy was, he was caught in the middle of a scream: backing away from the duel disk, hair flattened against a now-invisible wall, eyes electric with fear. The sight makes Shingo want to fling the card out the window and erase it from his memory, but that’s not all – scrawled across the bottom half of the card in inky crimson are two desperate words:

 

 

It was a mistake to say it out loud. The sheets rustle in Yuuya’s bed, and Shingo whirls around in a panic. But Yuuya doesn’t yell – he just stares, quietly, with his large red eyes. Then he smiles, like he always does, except it’s different. And then he laughs, like he always does, except it’s also different. His laugh goes up and up and up and it never stops, high and broken like glass, shattered in the lime moonlight.


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Don’t ask for my forgiveness, idiot!!”

Shingo’s first response to Yuuya’s laughter, against all better judgment, is to wrap him in a large hug. At the very least, it shuts him up from sheer shock.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for, okay?” Shingo says into Yuuya’s hair, and he’s surprised to find that he means every word. “We’re at war. We do what we have to do. So stop apologising, Yuuya.”

For a few long seconds, Yuuya’s rigid as a board. Then, like a miracle, he melts – leaning into Shingo’s arms and settling against his chest, breathing even and gentle. Shingo can’t see his face, but he’d like to believe he’s smiling for real now, with the smile that truly never dies.

When Shingo grows up and becomes the Major General of the Obelisk Force, he’ll chastise his subordinates for cowardice and treachery as much as he wants. But for now, he’s just Sawatari Shingo, and Sakaki Yuuya is his friend. And even if he knows nothing of Yuuya’s pain, at least he can be here for him now, in the night, when the stars stop being real.


End file.
